Organizations generate vast amounts of data. The data may include, for example, raw data of a business such as sales data, click through data, marketing data, customer data, and electronic mail messages, and raw data of a governmental entity such as samplings from road sensors, traffic cameras, weather forecasts, event schedules, construction schedules, and passenger manifests. In addition, the data may include analytics data generated by various analytics tools from the raw data.
An increasing number of users need access to such data of an organization. It can be difficult, however, for the users to cull through the vast amounts of data to find the data that is of interest to them. In addition, the time it takes for users to cull through the data may mean that the users may not find the data soon enough to take effective action. For example, an analytics tool may predict a drop in revenue for a business, but the executives of the organization may not find out about the predicted drop in revenue until it is too late to redirect marketing efforts to mitigate the drop. As another example, an analytics tool may predict traffic congestion resulting from a planned construction project, but users in a transportation department may not find out about the predicted traffic congestion soon enough to take steps to avoid the congestion. To find out about such data, users typically either log into their system to search for the data they are looking for by running a report or receive an email sent by their system that may contain a report. Both ways of finding out about such data present challenges for the user. The first requires the user to have access to and repeatedly log into the system. The second requires the user to review what may be massive amounts of emails received in a day or to define rules to be applied to incoming emails, which may result in emails of interest being missed or going unnoticed for a few days.
Some systems allow users to sign up to receive notifications of certain events. For example, an article publication service may allow a user to specify queries or other criteria that define article that may be of interest to the user. When the article publication service receives a new article, it identifies which queries the new article matches and sends a notification to the user (e.g., via text message or message to an application of the article publication service executing on the user's smartphone). The user can then select to review that new article. In general, any user can sign up to receive any of the articles. A difficulty with such notifications is that a user needs to affirmatively specify each query, and a query may not define all the articles that may be of interest to a user. Another difficulty is that any article that is published via the article publication service is available to all users. For example, an article intended to be viewed only by users with a certain political philosophy will be available to anyone regardless of his or her political philosophy.